Nothing is straightforward in the world of literary taste.
When a phone call competes for attention with a real-world conversation, it wins. Everyone knows the distinctive high-and-dry feeling of being abandoned for a phone call, and of having to compensate -...
We read privately, mentally listening to the author's voice and translating the writer's thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it.
No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, Good food at it's best, you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried i...
Assuming a sentence rises into the air with the initial capital letter and lands with a soft-ish bump at the full stop, the humble comma can keep the sentence aloft all right, UP like this, UP, sort-o...
The problem is that it has become politically awkward to draw attention to absolutes of bad and good. In place of manners, we now have doctrines of political correctness, against which one offends at...
Come inside, it says, for CD’s, VIDEO’s, DVD’s, and BOOK’s.
Brackets come in various shapes, types and names:1 round brackets (which we call brackets, and the Americans call parentheses)2 square brackets [which we call square brackets, and the Americans call b...
No valentines from the cats again.
L'insulto é l'arma del debole.
In Beachcomber’s hilarious columns about the Apostropher Royal in The Express, a certain perversely comforting law is often reiterated: the Law of Conservation of Apostrophes. A heresy since the 13th...
Intelligence nowadays is all about application: it is the ability 'to take in a complex system and learn its rules on the fly'. For young people, this ability is second nature. Any fool knows that, if...
In my worst moments, I think the biggest effect of 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves' was to kill the happiness of people who had previously skipped through life, unaware of all the atrocities lurking in the wor...
You know those self-help books that give you permission to love yourself? This one gives you permission to love punctuation.
Cruelty to punctuation is quite unlegislated: you can get away with pulling the legs off semicolons; shrivelling question marks on the garden path under a powerful magnifying glass; you name it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it usually aspiring gangsta rappers who set such store by designer labels?
Using the comma well announces that you have an ear for sense and rhythm, confidence in your style and a proper respect for your reader,
There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and those who don't, and I'll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken.
Many aspects of our screen-bound lives are bad for our social skills simply because we get accustomed to controlling the information that comes in, managing our relationships electronically, deleting...
Fulcrum